THX 1138

George Lucas’s first major studio production features a universe in the future in which strict rigidity is hailed over any sort of creativity.  THX 1138 acts as a social commentary on the way life was lead back in the seventies, but the principles and thematic qualities of the film still remain useful to study in contemporary terms.  By utilizing variations of short and long scenes, dramatic color schemes, and a glaring lack of dialogue a story is developed that evokes a certain emotional vastness and causes us, as the audience, to question the reality of the cinematic world we watch intently.  Film allows both creators and audiences to explore impossible imaginative ideas in a way that feels and looks so realistic that it often draws our own consciousness into doubt.  One of Lucas’s main arguments constructed by THX 1138 is about looking at our world through film as a reflective space and calling into question what we think of as concrete.

A major theme of Lucas’s works, especially exploited in this piece, is a sense of watching or voyeurism that feels judgmental and eerily personal.   He creates a window into a private sector of a world in which everything is standardized and public.  Other films that make use of intense voyeurism, like Rear Window, still retain the humanlike sense of reality, but George Lucas plays with the gaze from a different perspective of looking in on the subject from the point of view of an object. The repetitive scenes in which THX and LUH are being shot straight on from the perspective of behind their private bathroom mirror are both disturbing visually and intriguing thematically.  They are providing a view into a space that is usually deemed private or intimate, yet each scene was carefully built systematically to give off a sense of hostility and mechanical rigidity.  Because the camera never moves or follows the subjects on screen the audience is left feeling as though they are outsiders looking into another space, not included in the cinematic experience as other filmmakers might try to accomplish.  George Lucas’s play with images from behind a bathroom mirror also seem representative of the overall theme of looking into society through film as a reflective medium.  It is obvious that THX 1138 works as a social commentary on the economic dependency and rigid infrastructures that Lucas is criticizing, but the ways in which he distorts normal perspectives speaks to how he sees the error in the mechanical qualities of society and not the people that populate it.  Although THX and LUH have their flaws, they are wholly perfect in our eyes because they reject the frightening images of submissive and sedated worlds along their journey to full enlightenment.  THX becomes our protagonist because he fights for something that we believe in too had we lived in his universe.

Lucas toys with the idea of utopias and dystopias as versions of reality as well.  Depending on any audience member’s perspective of what a utopia or dystopia may be in their mind THX 1138 may depict their idyllic society or epitome of their worst fears.  Both utopias and dystopias are severe and extreme forms of a realistic society in existence, but in this sense they both function the same theoretical way.  They both require some kind of control or conformity of homogeneity that often scares humans to heavily consider, and both are stark and harsh in their visual manifestations.  In the scene in which THX wanders through a purely white void of two dimensional depth the total whiteness can be interpreted as either pure and innocent and refreshing or as a hellish white that engulfs the audience and its subjects without remorse.  To the creators and controllers of THX’s world, especially the robots, their control is what is needed to maintain a utopian sense of order, but to the inhabitants and the audience of this world their control is precisely what creates the opposite dystopian dissatisfaction with their way of life. Telotte discusses the importance of realizing the differences between reality and virtual reality and how THX 1138embodies George Lucas’s emphasis on the dangers of representation as a replacement of reality.

I am not sure of the personal context in which George Lucas envisioned this film or the creative process of how he constructed whole new social environments with their own structures and hierarchal systems, but much of that information on his background would be vital to understanding why he made the conscious decisions in THX 1138 that complete its sense of cinematic reality.  Doing more research into his personal life could reveal a lot about the social criticisms and theoretical claims he has made throughout the movie.